Respondents to the Plant Engineering 2017 Maintenance Study identified six important, high-level findings impacting the manufacturing industries today:

1. Maintenance strategies: Seventy-eight percent of manufacturing facilities follow a preventive maintenance strategy; 61% use a run-to-failure method and 59% use a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).
2. Shutdown schedule: Standard and specialized production machinery are generally shutdown only once or twice each year for scheduled maintenance, while material handling equipment is typically shutdown on a quarterly or monthly basis.
3. Unscheduled downtime: The leading cause of unscheduled downtime within respondents’ facilities remains aging equipment (42%), followed by operator error (19%) and lack of time (13%). Some facilities plan to upgrade their equipment and improve/increase training in an effort to decrease downtime.
4. Training: Maintenance teams are mostly trained on safety (81%) and basic electrical (70%) and mechanical skills (66%). Other types of training include motors, gearboxes, bearings (58%) and lubrication (56%).
5. Technologies: The most common technologies facilities use to monitor/manage maintenance are CMMS (53%), in-house spreadsheets/schedules (52%), and paper records of maintenance reports (39%).
6. Outsourcing: The average facility outsources 19% of their maintenance operations, and the leading factors are lack of time/manpower and lack of skills among current staff.

Access the full 2017 Maintenance report to view additional findings.

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